Small Wonders

Comedy, off the radar.

On cable and online, comics like W. Kamau Bell have the freedom to be more strange.Credit Illustration by Gary Taxali

In 1950, when “Your Show of Shows” débuted, it quickly became NBC’s hippest series, a set of dervish-quick skits and parodies, performed live every Saturday night. Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, the lead actors, became stars. New Yorkers gathered at bars to watch together. Yet the show was never a huge hit, like Milton Berle’s variety show or “I Love Lucy,” and even those series were on TV, after all, an untested medium, with low stakes and lower expectations. On such a wall, you could toss any spaghetti you liked.

As televisions got cheaper, audiences grew and admen became powerful, and networks stopped taking risks. Over the decades, comedy remained a release valve for radical sensibilities, but its conventions congealed: there’s a formula to “Saturday Night Live,” and network talk shows are even more aggressively conventional. Whenever Letterman hints that he’ll retire, I roll my eyes. They’ll just pick another white guy. Perhaps it’ll be a Conan-like ironist, or someone boyish, like Jimmy Fallon, but it will be a distinction without a difference. Luckily, it’s become easier each year to escape that world, by fleeing to a constellation of smaller channels and to the Internet, where idiosyncrasy reigns. In Vanity Fair’s recent comedy issue, Chris Rock waxed nostalgic for the era when a successful comic had to make everyone laugh: to “work any crowd,” from the “Tonight Show” to the Apollo, which may be a lost skill. But odd humor, strange humor, the type that not everyone gets, has always been around, and it, too, has its value. Often, it grows best in narrow spaces.

W. Kamau Bell isn’t doing anything structurally fresh on his new talk show, “Totally Biased,” which airs on the cable network FX. Yet the show feels faintly revolutionary, just because the man is black—ridiculous but true, given the whiteness of late-night TV. A handsome, affable fellow, with a deep chuckle and a shaggy ’fro, Bell came up in the San Francisco alternative-comedy scene. He has no desk, but he does a monologue (which, like many late-night monologues, is hit or miss), and a likably spontaneous man-on-the-street segment. In one episode, after Hurricane Sandy, he visits a gas-station line, where a driver tells Bell that the police are helping to move his car. “When a black man gets pushed by the cops, that’s a good day,” Bell says. “Yeah, well, it depends on how you being pushed,” the man replies.

Bell isn’t the first black male comedy host: Arsenio Hall had his own show, too, beginning in 1989. But, while Hall’s show was a phenomenon, it had a manic, anxious sizzle, partly because he strained to reach the largest possible audience. (Later, as ratings sank, Hall threw caution to the wind and interviewed Louis Farrakhan for an hour.) Bell’s show works because, in the hip precincts of FX, he can simply take black culture as the show’s default, the way network shows presume white culture. “There are actually more black ‘Seinfeld’ fans than there are black Kwanzaa fans,” Bell argued, in one bit. “I only know like a handful of people who do it, and two of them are white lesbians with black kids.” To use a gag-worthy phrase, Bell’s gimmick is intersectional progressivism: he treats racial, gay, and women’s issues as inseparable. That may not sound hilarious, but when it works it grants him new routes into old topics. In one guest bit, he and the black lesbian comic Wanda Sykes bonded over having white wives. Like Fallon, Bell has a nice-guy vibe, which lends his show the air of a laid-back, welcoming party: when he mistook a sexually ambiguous Comic-Con attendee for a woman, the label “Replay of Shame” appeared over a slo-mo clip—but, refreshingly, the joke was on him, not on the interviewee.

Bell was in good form throughout the election, and, after Obama won, the show turned relaxed and triumphant. The black comic Hannibal Buress did a routine in which he put up a series of post-election tweets on the screen. The final one read, “What’s faster than a nigger that just stole a TV? Obama with the United States of America.” Buress gazed wearily out at the audience, then paused. “Sometimes, if it’s a racist joke, I get it,” he said. “But that one, I’m just like . . . yo, that was weird. Just a weird joke. And it’s bad—bad structure, and I don’t get it.” Then some advice: “Shouldn’t have tweeted that. Should have put that in the drafts, man. Step up your racist tweet game. We’re watching you.”

On other cable networks, particularly IFC, Comedy Central, and the Cartoon Network, a wild array of comedy series are taking similar advantage of their niche status. On the Cartoon Network, there’s the stoner-ready late-night lineup Adult Swim, which includes smart animated series like “The Venture Bros.,” as well as “Childrens Hospital,” an anarchic live ensemble series that parodies “Grey’s Anatomy”-style medical dramas. There’s also “The Eric Andre Show,” which is, like “Totally Biased,” a talk show with a black nerd host (his co-host is Buress), but with a rawer, more aggressive vibe—Andre’s version of the man-on-the-street segment involved him touching the hands of strangers, then murmuring, “It’s touch-a-stranger’s-hand day.”

In fact, when you turn from network to cable, TV overflows with black male comedy, much of it slyly political: there’s also Adult Swim’s animated version of the black-power comic strip “The Boondocks” and Comedy Central’s skit show “Key & Peele,” which had a bit about a self-aware bully that is one of the best things I’ve seen all year. IFC has “Comedy Bang! Bang!” and the ultra-white “Portlandia,” whose aperture is so narrow that its audience consists of people who laugh at jokes about Evites and feminist-bookstore owners (guilty!). Such shows, at their worst, can turn twee or solipsistic, but a smaller audience means more tolerance for risk, not to mention the chance for a strange thing to stay alive. Contrast FX’s cheaply made sitcom “Louie” with NBC’s brilliant “Community,” which crumpled under the pressure to speak to everyone.

You have to head online to find the true Wild West, where pioneers have cobbled together quasi-organized Deadwood-like comedy encampments, shooting off viral videos like pistols, and scratching together a subsistence economy using Kickstarter and PayPal. The best sketches from “Portlandia” and “Key & Peele” are passed virally, friend to friend; Web sites like Funny or Die and College Humor operate as loosely run studios, producing material that viewers vote up and down. Standups saturate Twitter, devising new comedy forms within a hundred and forty characters.

Amid such chaos, the Onion is a grizzled old prospector, having staked its virtual territory back in 1996. A fake media empire, the Onion specializes in deadpan satires like “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex”; occasionally, these articles become accidental hoaxes, accepted by news sources as the real thing.

In 2007, the organization launched a video offshoot, the Onion News Network, which now appears on IFC as well as online, applying the same satirical tools to cable news but rendering them, amazingly, even more nihilistic. While other comics do fake news (Stephen Colbert is the form’s undisputed champion), the Onion’s gift is never to break character or seek applause. In one segment, a reporter seduces the wife of a missing soldier, even as he conducts interviews with her and her children. “Emma is entering adolescence at a time when having a father figure can be crucial,” the voice-over intones, as the reporter brushes the girl’s hair. The video ends with an eerie shot through the depressed woman’s window, as she succumbs to his embrace. On a TV skit show, that premise would get defanged with some goofy twist, but there’s a cruel control to ONN, whose theme seems to be that the objective reporting voice is itself fundamentally insane; not for nothing is its slogan “News Without Mercy.” “Once again, I close this video with nary a quiver of fear in my voice about the uncertainty of the human condition,” one broadcast concludes. “That’s professionalism.”

Of course, to produce cult humor you have to get someone to pay for it—ideally, your cult. Last year, when Louis C.K. put his stage show online, he charged five dollars a download, and ended up grossing more than $1.1 million. A few weeks ago, Maria Bamford, another alternative comedian, took a similar plunge, but, unlike Louis, who fills stadiums, Bamford is a comic’s comic, with a stylized, experimental act that lingers in the mind, full of riffs on her struggles with anxiety and depression. In 2007, Bamford produced a Web series called “The Maria Bamford Show”; its premise was that she had moved home to Minnesota after a nervous breakdown, and that the show was being filmed in her family’s living room. (In the past few years, Bamford has been hospitalized for mental illness.) It was a cold blast of brilliance, capturing in miniature the existential loneliness of someone who feared she’d never be able to live in the world of “normal” people, and filled with half-affectionate, half-disparaging imitations of her family and friends.

Bamford’s newest show, “The Special Special Special!,” which is available for download on Chill.com, is a more polished product, but equally radical—as unsettling as anything Andy Kaufman ever did. As Bamford performs at a mike in the living room, the camera keeps cutting to the supportive laughter of the only people who are in the audience: her parents, seated on the couch (the ultimate in narrowcasting). Bamford is tiny and blond, and speaks in a voice that is squeaky and hyper-feminine, but then she’ll suddenly shriek a word, or drop into the low tones of a stoner guy, or stretch her mouth into a grotesque, rubbery gape. In one extended riff, she performs a series of damning imitations, based on what would happen if people treated physical illness as dismissively as they do mental disorders. “You’d think you’d be able to stop vomiting for me and the kids,” she says weepily. In a bland female voice, she whispers, “Apparently. Steve. Has cancer.” Then a pause, her chin drops, and she glares with furious incredulity. “It’s like, fuck off! We all have cancer. Right?” Her parents laugh in appreciation, but it’s a routine that is unlikely to win every viewer over. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to. ♦